Information processing systems, such as desktop computers, portable computers, intelligent mobile phones, etc., have been popular in people's daily life, and people can use them for work, entertainment, Internet-access, or even remote communication. With reduced cost of information processing systems after popularization, a user may possess several information processing systems. Generally, the user uses an external input device to input data into an information processing system. The above-mentioned input device may be a keyboard, a mouse or a game controller. In order to facilitate using of the above-mentioned input device and solve the problem of limited moving range of the cable, the conventional wired transmission is evolved into wireless transmission. As this kind of input device has limited data transmission amount and volume, the infrared technology or the Bluetooth technology is adopted for wireless transmission of the input device. However, the infrared transmission is limited by distance and receiving direction, thus an infrared mouse has limited operating area. Because the Bluetooth mouse is less limited in receiving direction and has lower power consumption, it is more promising than the infrared mouse. Hence, many electronic products have adopted the Bluetooth technology for wireless communication. A R.O.C. publication No. 200846976 discloses a related technology entitled “Bluetooth Data Transmission Device and Method Thereof” including a mouse, a keyboard or a touch panel, and a first Bluetooth element for transmitting data to a computer electrically connected with a second Bluetooth element. The prior art uses a mouse or a keyboard to transmit commands to a computer via the Bluetooth technology.
A R.O.C. patent No. M341266 discloses a related technology entitled “Keys and Keyboard”, which uses a conductive plate as a part of an antenna. The conductive plate is boned to or clamped below a keycap of a key. As the key containing a part of an antenna, it is not only equipped with the Bluetooth transmission function, but also saves space.
Although the Bluetooth keyboard is superior to the infrared keyboard, the conventional Bluetooth keyboard merely focuses on one-to-one wireless transmission between the keyboard and a single device but not selecting different linking devices, and lacks a fast linkage-switching technology. At present, the Bluetooth transmission device has to search for linkable devices once again in each linking process.
It is more troublesome to use a mouse adopting the Bluetooth technology. A mouse is unable to display the linkable devices. Therefore, when the user intends to establish a linkage between a Bluetooth mouse and a computer, he/she has to execute “Linkage Addition” function to choose the Bluetooth mouse at the computer end. When the user intends to link the same Bluetooth mouse to another computer, he still has to execute the “Linkage Addition” function to choose the Bluetooth mouse at another computer end. It is obvious that if a computer is not equipped with a mouse, it is difficult to operate the computer. Therefore, it is very troublesome to execute the “Linkage Addition” function before the Bluetooth mouse is linked to the computer.
In order to overcome the above-mentioned problems, the Applicant has filed an application entitled “Input Device with Multi-object Switch Transmission” in Japan utility model No. 3155578. Refer to FIG. 1 for the prior art, an input device 2 and multiple information processing systems 1 respectively having a Bluetooth transmission device 3 are provided (in this prior art, the Bluetooth transmission devices at two sides are respectively denoted by 31 and 32). The input device 2 includes a plurality of device identification codes (Bd_address) and device authorization codes (link key) stored therein and linked to the information processing devices 1, which are necessary for bidirectional data transmission. Thereby, the input device 2 needn't search for and establish linking data once again when switching the linking objects.
The Japan prior art can be applied to a Bluetooth keyboard or a Bluetooth mouse. In practice, the user can choose one of the linking objects via using the keyboard or the mouse. The keyboard has sufficient space to accommodate extra keys. Alternatively, different combinations of the keys can be used to execute the selection function. However, the mouse does not have sufficient space to accommodate extra keys or execute the selection function through different combinations of keys. Therefore, the conventional Bluetooth mouse still leaves a lot to be improved to actually achieve fast switching linking function among several computers.